Martoons

Today: Wide Eyes demonstrates some duplicity.

Cast of characters

Thomas

Wide Eyes

Coffee Lady

Mr Go

*

Wide Eyes consoled him: “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“This whole God-forsaken country wants to learn Englishy so if you can’t scrounge up a handful of students among, what, 40 million people, you’ve got serious, serious problems.”

Thomas was getting hungry again and getting all tingly.

He was also buzzing out from the coffee.

What Wide Eyes was saying was giving him a spark of hope.

Wide Eyes: “People here will pay you silly amounts of cash just to sit at a table, drink coffee or soju, and talk. Talk talk talk. It’s easy. You can even make shit up. Just talk to them!

“They’ll take you to the singing rooms, to restaurants, to the mountains. Women will sleep with you. Men will sleep with you if that’s your preference. It’s crazy man.”

He snuffed out his cigarette. “Look big guy, I gotta go. I got the coffees. You take it easy eh?”

“I’ll take it any way I can get it,” he quipped back smiling.

Wide Eyes smirked. “Yeah, I know I know. And if that fails, you’ll take it by force? Hee hee.”

* Tipping in Korea: Is Oddball a skinflint? *

They shook hands again, this time vigorously.

Wide Eyes gave him a sincere thumbs-up and quickly extricated himself from the booth.

He approached the counter where Coffee Lady was tidying-up and counted off a small pile of bills for her.

She picked up the money and tried to refuse but he’d already turned his back on her and was headed out.

He did that every time – left way too much money.

In a sense, the cash hungry Coffee Lady didn’t mind but there was always a price to pay – after hours ‘favours.’

It was becoming a regular thing now and she found it repulsive but decided to take it while she could get it – the Oddball kept telling her he was leaving Korea any day.

* Cross-cultural liasons: Do Coffee Lady and Thomas have feelings for each other? *

But as the days went by, that day wasn’t coming soon enough.

Especially now that she had a new crush – the handsome dirty-blonde, ruddy-complexioned foreigner from Go’s institute who was presently sitting at the booth across the floor.

She carefully raised her eyes to glance over at him and caught him staring at her.

She quickly looked back down and felt a tingle.

Her arms got ‘chicken skin.’

She giggled but put her hand up to mask it.

But Thomas felt foolish flirting with her.

The way things were going now he too might be leaving any day.

Then again, leaving might not be all that easy either.

He had a feeling that nothing was easy in Korea.

* Undermining techniques – what is Oddball scheming? *

Wide Eyes had a mischievous smirk as he descended the staircase from Coffee Lady’s café to the street.

Even though it was already late evening and he’d just rolled out of bed several hours earlier, his plan had worked.

He’d known from talking to Coffee Lady that Thomas, like most of us, was a creature of habit and frequented Coffee Shop Max around this time.

And alas, the Golden God (as Wide Eyes called him) had indeed appeared.

They had needed to talk; Thomas because he was culture-shocked; Wide Eyes because he needed to plant the seed in Golden God’s little universe that pay day might very well be a dud.

That would de-stabilize Thomas’ confidence in Mr Go.

And apparently it had.

Wide Eyes was now off to inform the boss that ‘their’ plan was moving right along.

At street level, though, laziness overcame him and he nipped into a phone booth and called instead.

“Number One Way-gook is on the way out,” he told Go, who was immediately baffled.

“Yeah?”

“Thomas I’m talking about.”

“You met … Thomas?”

“Yes. I don’t have time to talk now but he will probably leave Korea soon. As soon as he go bye-bye, you know what you have to do.” He hung up.

Go sat at his desk staring quizzically at the phone in his hand.

What was that all about?

Truth be told, he had no clue what Wide Eyes meant by ‘their plan’ or ‘what he (Go) had to do now.’

But he had an inkling that it had something to do with the handful of recent ‘secret’ meetings Wide Eyes had conducted here in his office; the ones where the waygook insisted on bringing a bottle of soju.

Go had blacked-out at these meetings after a time, and had no recall what was discussed.

He only had vague images of the neon signs flashing outside his office window, blazing and flickering madly, inflicting their illuminating assault on his eyes and mind.

*

Tomorrow: Wide Eyes attempts to seduce Coffee Lady.